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Thursday, October 17, 2013

The New York Film Festival wrapped up
this past weekend, and it made me realize that the current model of film
distribution/presentation is at best antiquated and at worst totally stupid.

Festivals like NYFF play a lot of so-called "art-house films" (an
anachronym if I've ever heard one; when's the last time you went to an
"art house"?) and the way these get released to the public hasn't
changed in decades: Play the festival circuit, then open in 4 theaters in
NYC/LA, then maybe open in a few multiplexes, then a few more if the numbers
are going in the right direction. Needless to say, unless the film is a hit,
most people in the country have to wait until the video release to see these
movies, which could happen a year or more after that initial festival screening.

This is dumb.

There are plenty of movies I'd like to see that were at NYFF, but I'll have to
wait months for them to be available. Why are movies like this? With what other
artistic medium are we prevented from experiencing the finished product for
such a long time? Imagine if a novel was released and only people in New York
City and LA could read it. Or if an album dropped and you could only listen to
it at a certain venue at a certain time. These scenarios are preposterous, but
for some reason are accepted when applied to film.

I propose a very simple idea: a movie gets one release date, and on this day it
is released simultaneously in theaters, on DVD and Blu-ray, and through VOD
services like iTunes. This is the omnipresent release strategy every other mainstream
artistic medium has adopted in the 21st century, and movies are lagging behind
with a severely outdated system.

What are the plausible reasons for keeping movie distribution the way it is
now? Let's tackle each one:

"Movies cost so much that a lot of
hype has to be built up about its release in order to make its money
back."

Ok, assuming this is true, is the "platform" strategy really the best
way for films to maximize its intake of money? One of the films I really wanted
to see at NYFF this year was THE WIND RISES. Disney (or Disney-owned Miramax) has been in charge of the
domestic distribution of all the Miyazaki films since PRINCESS MONONOKE and they’ve
always employed a platforming strategy (film festivals, limited release, bigger
release). What kind of lucre has this resulted in? Take a look….

PONYO actually opened "wide" (927 theaters; SPIRITED AWAY topped out
at 714 at its widest) and unsurprisingly grossed the most at 15 million. These
are, frankly, piss-poor results. All this strategy has done is withhold the films
from Miyazaki fans while Disney desperately tries (and fails) to convince other
people to see something they don’t want to see. (Can you even think of another
product with a publicity strategy that does everything to entice uninterested
people at the expense of its actual fans?)
And I’m sorry but you can't tell me that making the movie available to everyone
in the US at once—in the form of $10 movie tickets, $20 Blu-rays, $7.99 VOD
rentals—wouldn't result in more money. Maybe in the past the platforming
strategy was necessary, but in our broadband connected world, this is not the
case anymore. The acceptance of online streaming and emphasis on consumer choice has fundamentally changed the way we watch TV, and it's time for the same change to be made for movies."Movies were meant to be seen in a
theater."

This is another thing that was true once, but no longer. Once theaters switched
to digital projectors, they could no longer claim that they were offering a
unique experience, or even a "correct" one. Everyone's home set-up
now deals with the same pixels as movie theaters, with the same simulated
24fps. There is no more film being run through projectors with its dreamlike
shutter clicking away—a moot point anyway since most movies aren't being shot
on film. And consider this: The hot tech in movie theater video projection
these days is 4K, a resolution that will be standard in consumer TVs within 2
years. Home presentation of movies isn't only "just as good" as
theaters these days, it’s better. Besides, think about other media again. Does
the music industry demand people listen to new music in optimal conditions, to
preserve the “integrity” of the experience or whatever? No, they let people buy
it (or stream it) and listen to it however they want, whether it's on vinyl
coming out of gorgeous speakers, or hideously compressed mp3s coming out of $5
earbuds. Not only that, but everyone has accepted any of these options as
legitimate means of consumption. Only those afflicted with the most distasteful
snobbery would insist that someone who had only listened to an album in mp3
form hadn't actually listened to the album yet. And speaking of snobs, we come
to a final reason movie distribution is the way it is....

"It allows a bunch of people to
feel superior to others and write a bunch of meaningless reviews."

This seems to be the only real reason the current system is in place. (This and
each individual festival's vested financial interest in keeping it going.) All
these advance screenings allow the press and those in major cities to feel
really special for a few months. Having attended a handful of advance
screenings, I know this feeling well. There’s no question that if I lived in
NYC, I’d have seen those films at NYFF. So, ultimately, I don't hold it against people
for doing something I'd partake in given the opportunity.

That is, unless they write reviews immediately afterward.

Reviews of art should be a good-faith interaction between reviewer and reader.
The sometimes elusive reason for writing is crystallized when writing a review;
it is abundantly clear you are writing for another person, because only a
"touched" person opines to nobody, to nothing but air. (Whereas in
other forms of writing this distinction is a bit hazier: one might say that
writing down the truth is eo ipso "of worth," regardless whether
anyone is reading it, cf. Hemingway's definition of good fiction being one true
sentence after another....But I seriously digress.)

So when it comes to reviews of a movie that played at a film festival 24 hours
ago, it invites the question: who could these early reviews possibly be for?
When someone reviews a movie that 99% of the people who want to see the movie won't watch it for months, what's the
point? What good is writing a review of HER now? The truth is that that person is writing the review solely for other
film critics, trying to impress them and appear cool to everyone else. It's no
wonder that film critics these days seem more cloistered and snobby than ever.

Of course, the critic can rebut that people will be able to track down his
review after they've seen the movie (in 4+ months). My response to that is: If the audience for
your piece isn't going to read it for 4 months, why not write it 4 months from
now? I think we’d all agree that time spent on almost anything—especially
writing—makes that thing better. But the fact is your average movie critic
places a premium on being first to comment on something and to make some sort
of judgment, and this rush to add to the noise comes at the expense of
insightful, considered writing.

A concrete example of this: I watched UPSTREAM COLOR on blu-ray, about five
months after its premiere at the Sundance film festival. I was struck by the
movie and wanted to write something that would contribute to the discussion. I
wrote an essayish thing that concentrated on something very narrow: The similarities it shared with Kieslowski’s BLUE. Now, a quick Google search
reveals that I wasn’t the first one to notice these similarities. Ray Pride,
writing for Movie City News, wrote about it right after he saw the movie at Sundance. The thing is, he briefly mentioned it and moved on. My piece was
1,700 words and offered a far more detailed look.Now maybe Mr. Pride didn’t have anything
else on the subject. If I had to guess, he was just citing all the allusions he
could remember as quickly as possible in order to be the first to do so, which
is something that all film critics do these days. But here we are, not even a
year removed from Sundance, and people looking for more information on this
particular connection don’t really care about a brief mention by someone just
trying to meet a deadline. My blog post is rightly at the top of the search
results on the subject.I’m not even saying my piece is
particularly great. I’m not a film historian or anything. (This is not false
modesty; I thought the essay would be a lot better when I first began it but
quickly found that I lacked the in-depth knowledge required to make it truly
incisive.) But it is a hell of a lot more developed than Mr. Pride’s cursory
mention. Of course, I had many advantages that Mr. Pride didn’t: I was able to
see the movie more than once, revisit certain scenes, and use screencaps to
support my thesis. Having the Blu-ray as a reference was overwhelmingly useful when
sitting down to write a critical piece, and I found myself with the same benefits
typically afforded those who write critically about other art forms. I had the
movie available to me in the same way music critics have the album they’re
writing about on hand.In a way, how silly is it that most
movie reviewers watch a movie exactly once and don’t go back over it at all
before writing their reviews? Imagine a music critic listening to an album
exactly one time, or a book reviewer not having the book around to either quote
from or double-check a reference. Put simply: how insightful can we expect film
critics to be after only one viewing?Someone arguing this might point out that
critics have been operating this way since time immemorial. And some of them were
quite good. Pauline Kael—who notoriously refused to see a movie more than once—wrote
some of the best film criticism of all time, dropping insight that is still
valuable to read today. And she did
it on a weekly basis.Well, I hate to break it to all you
contemporary film critics: None of you are Pauline Kael. She was a
one-of-a-kind genius, a brilliant writer who just happened to write film
criticism. Kael should not be regarded as just
another critic with an innate ability shared with lots of other critics, but rather
as an outlier with the uncanny ability to be both perspicacious and
illuminating, all under a time crunch. Not everyone can do what she did, in
fact she might be the only one who could do what she did. Which is why most
critics would be better served waiting a few months and really thinking about a
review they will feel a lot more responsibility for, since many more people
will be reading it.

The public discourse about film these days reeks of some kind of weird elitism.
Upon a worthwhile movie's release, there always seems to be a sharp division
between people who have already seen it months ago at some film festival or
during a limited release in NYC/LA and those who are getting the opportunity to
see it for the first time. For better or worse, any voice can be disseminated
as easily as the next, and those who see movies first have the opportunity to not
only drive the discussion but exhaust it as well, so that by the time a film is
available to 99% of the population, it feels stale and stripped of relevance.It’s because of this situation that film
is no longer a cultural touchstone. For something to be important to a culture,
it has to have the participation of the culture. It has to be readily available
to be experienced and discussed with other people. Without that wide
involvement with the general public, we are left with a small group of
self-styled arbiters of taste who do nothing but make facile judgments in an
attempt to seem cool to others in their group.This is a real shame because film
criticism is very important. Good criticism shows us the way to great art. The
passionate critics of the Cahiers du
Cinema made us see Hollywood stalwarts like Hitchcock and Ray in a new
light, and critics like Kael explicated the value of the Nouvelle Vague.With no genius critic in sight, I
suppose all we can do is implore the current crop of critics to take more
time to write their criticism, in the perhaps futile hope that they get better.
It would also help to change the mindset that has made writing about
movies nothing more than a way to advertise how cool one is. A lot of critics
just need to stop writing, stop talking, and stop thinking about movies
altogether. Of course, you won’t be able to tell this to the people who truly
love cinema. But it’s also easy to convince yourself you love movies when in reality all
you love is the feeling of talking before anyone else can get a word in.
If all you care about is when review embargoes are lifted, that's a good indication of where your true interest lies. Also, I would ask all the critics or wannabe critics who attended NYFF this question:
If every movie you saw was available to everyone in the country on that day,
either in the theater or on a Blu-ray disc or as a download, would you still have
seen it? If the answer is “no”—or even if there is the slightest hesitation on
your part—then I would say you should get really introspective for a minute and
be prepared to confront some truths about yourself you might not like.

About Me

So I'm officially an author. My book is called Deadly Reflections, and is available on the Kindle Store right this second. I encourage anyone who likes a good love story with paranormal aspects to check it out!